Project name:

YEP4Europe: Youth e-perspectives on migration

Project description:

Young people from all over Europe, learning about digital journalism to create a picture of migration how we see it with our own eyes!

This strategic partnership is a response to the current refugee crisis in Europe and the fact that young people need up-to-date digital and media literacy skills to be able to use digital technologies to address the social issues around them.

Thus, the project addresses the call priorities to develop innovative methods for enhancing digital skills of young people and to promote their active citizenship and social entrepreneurship at the same time. Digital skills will be developed in parallel with skills for civic participation in dealing with current social issues.

Three of the four partners are telecentre-type organisations working mainly with young people. The partners chose to combine these two priorities because they have been working for a long time to enhance digital skills of young people through non-formal education and training methods and enable them to actively participate in the digital society. Telecentres are the engines of digital literacy in local communities and are best equipped to reach specific groups such as socially or economically disadvantaged youth.

In this project, the partners are designing an innovative methodology for empowering young people to address issues related to migration, look for solutions and provoke action using digital tools. The methodology will be based on three interrelated digital media workshops. The refugee crisis being the focus theme of the project, the methodology will be adaptable to other topics of societal significance. Through the combination of digital skills modules with soft skills such as creativity, self-expression, communication, and basic elements of project management, the training programme will help young people to think logically and constructively to solve issues that they encounter in real life and put their ideas into practice using digital media.

Furthermore, the project will contribute to the call priority for promoting high quality youth work and strengthening the training paths of youth workers, because youth workers will be able to apply the training methodology to different contexts. Multimedia methods such as digital photography and digital storytelling are increasingly being used with educational purposes in different subject areas to make the subject more attractive for the youth. These methods are steadily making their way not only in schools but also into telecentres whose main target group is young people. Adequate methodologies are needed, however, in order to exploit the potential of this method to the fullest, while at the same time taking into account the risks they entail such as issues of online privacy, hate speech, data protection and cybersecurity.

The main target group in terms of end users is young people 16-29 from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. At the same time, the benefits of “Youth e-Perspectives on Migration” stretch beyond the young people who will directly participate in the training, because it will provide a platform for expression for migrants and refugees in the participating countries and aim to foster tolerance and solidarity between cultures, empowering young Europeans to be active, participative citizens, which is beneficial to the community at large.